Field of the Application
The application relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly, to apparatuses and methods for handovers in a wireless mesh network supporting only the flooding-based propagation mechanism.
Description of the Related Art
The use of wireless mesh networks has increased in recent years to improve the range of wireless communications. A wireless mesh network typically includes a plurality of wireless nodes that communicate with one another to propagate data packets. For example, in a multi-hop wireless mesh network, a data packet is propagated from a source node, or an originating node, to a destination node by “hopping” from one wireless node to another until the data packet reaches the destination node. As such, each node in a wireless mesh network operates as both a receiver and a transmitter to communicate data packets between intermediate nodes.
Flooding is a common network operation in which a data packet is sent by one node to every other node in a wireless mesh network. Each wireless node that receives that data packet, and hasn't received it before, forwards it to every other known neighboring node except for the originating node. The flooding of data packets can be performed in either unicast or broadcast transmissions. Unicast transmissions are point-to-point, one node to another, with an acknowledgment packet sent back as a reply. Unicast transmissions are a reliable means of communication, but they can be problematic in very dense networks because the number of unicast packets needed to perform the flooding operation increases quadratically with the number of nodes in a wireless mesh network. Broadcast transmissions are point-to-multipoint, one node to every other node within the range of wireless communications. In a broadcast transmission, the number of data packets necessary to flood increases linearly with the number of nodes. In this regard, flooding with broadcast transmissions is more efficient than flooding with unicast transmissions. However, broadcast transmissions do not acknowledge receipt of data packets, so they are considered less reliable than unicast transmissions.